Book review: The Carrier by Sophie Hannah

SOPHIE Hannah recently admitted during a Twitter conversation (she is one of the literary world’s more prolific and entertaining tweeters) that she can’t start writing a novel, much less care about it, until she has decided what its title will be.

She chose well with The Carrier, a title as ambiguous as it is intriguing and which gave her enough rope to construct a labyrinth of a psychological thriller.

Businesswoman Gaby Struthers is stuck in Germany overnight when her plane is diverted by bad weather, and finds herself a reluctant chaperone to Lauren, a young passenger who becomes hysterical as she realises she cannot get home.

Sophie Hannah is masterly at leading the reader down the wrong path and here she excels once again.

After they are forced to share a hotel room, Gaby realises it is no coincidence that hers and Lauren’s paths have collided. In a state of agitation, Lauren makes a remark about letting an innocent man go to prison. The man just happens to be Tim Breary, the love of Gaby’s life. Breary dumped Gaby, we discover, because he would not leave his wife for her, the same wife he has just confessed to killing.

The police investigating Francine Breary’s murder are recurring characters from Hannah’s previous books, including the peculiar but formidably intelligent DC Simon Waterhouse and his spiky sergeant wife Charlie Zailer. To them, the case appears all but solved.

Francine Breary was a stroke victim unable to move, talk or communicate her thoughts and her husband suffocated her with a pillow in a misguided mercy killing.

The problem is that Breary claims that wasn’t his motive. In fact, he actually has no idea at all why he did it. Unable to accept his confession of guilt, Gaby sets out to prove he is lying; but why would an innocent man frame himself for murder?

Waterhouse is equally intrigued by the conundrum and, because Hannah has his mind working permanently on a tangent, it is largely down to the police officer to tie the complicated but absorbing threads of the plot together.

It was in her last novel, Kind Of Cruel, that Hannah revealed the reason for Waterhouse’s emotional ineptness (and that is putting it mildly) and it is something of a relief that there is less focus on his problems in The Carrier and even a hint of stability to his marriage.

With that in mind, might we hope that her next psychological thriller is a standalone without these characters? It would be fascinating to see what she could produce unfettered by them (although she may give us a taste with the Hammer horror novella she has just written, The Orphan Choir).

As for The Carrier, do not think you have worked out where the plot is going and how it is going to end. Hannah is masterly at leading the reader down the wrong path and here she excels once again.